This column ran first in the online magazine for medical students, “in-Training”
In case you were wondering — robots won’t replace anesthesiologists any time soon, regardless of what the Washington Post may have to say. There will definitely be a place for feedback and closed-loop technology applications in sedation and in general anesthesia, but for the foreseeable future we will still need humans.
I’ve been practicing anesthesiology for 30 years now, in the operating rooms of major hospitals. Since 1999 I’ve worked at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, a large tertiary care private hospital in Los Angeles.
So what do I think today’s medical students should know about my field?
A “lifestyle” profession?
For starters, I have to laugh when I hear anesthesiology mentioned with dermatology and radiology as one of the “lifestyle” professions. Certainly there are outpatient surgery centers where the hours are predictable and there are no nights, weekends, or holidays on duty. The downside? You’re giving sedation for lumps, bumps, and endoscopies a lot of the time, which can be tedious. You may start to lose your skills in line placement, intubation, and emergency management.
Occasionally, though, if you work in an outpatient center, you’ll be asked to give anesthesia for inappropriately scheduled cases on patients who are really too high-risk to have surgery there. These patients slip through the cracks and there they are, in your preoperative area. Canceling the case costs everyone money and makes everyone unhappy. Yet if you proceed and something goes wrong, you can’t even get your hands on a unit of blood for transfusion. To me, working in an outpatient center is like working close to a real hospital but not close enough — a mixture of boredom and potential disaster.
The path I chose is to focus on high-risk inpatient cases. I especially enjoy thoracic surgery, with the challenges of complex patients and one-lung ventilation. You can bring me the sickest patient in the hospital setting — where I have all the monitoring techniques, resuscitation drugs, blood products, bronchoscopes, and anything else I might need — and I’ll be perfectly happy. The downside: a practice like mine tends to be stressful and tiring, and I never know the exact time that the day will end. Hospitals that offer Level I trauma and high-risk obstetric care are required to have anesthesiologists in house 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. There’s no perfect world.
What type of person is happy as an anesthesiologist?
Even though women comprised 47% of the US medical school graduates in 2014, only about 33% of the applicants for anesthesiology residency were women. I’d be interested to hear from all of you as to why fields such as pediatrics and ob-gyn tend to be so much more attractive to women, because I genuinely don’t understand it. But I do have a few thoughts as to the type of person who is happy or unhappy as an anesthesiologist.